Because for writers, or perhaps any artist, this movement between thinking and storytelling — between thinking and finding something to do — represents the ethical turn in Smith’s philosophy and in what she calls “the most powerful art.” This art, which like all art “stands in a dubious relation to necessity,” she’ll say, is produced in response to love — in fact, she’ll say this art is love enacted, like a banana bread made with love, like her portraits. Love, something we all respond to with whatever capacities we have at our disposal at any moment, the emotion at the center of grief, all this grief, which diminishes our capacities and must be the reason we fear love so much. And why we need it so much. Not just now, but especially now.
How did we get where we are, we human freaks of nature? Language, rational thought, art, science and technology set us apart from other species. Add to that list (more curse than accomplishment) an acute awareness of our own mortality. Other animals show faint glimmerings of innovation – crude tool use, for example – but no other species has so much as invented a fork, let alone a bicycle or a nuclear power plant. Something happened in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens to cause an explosion of ingenuity orders of magnitude greater than anything seen in other species, including our big-brained cousins the Neanderthals. But what? And when?
But this is Jonathan Lethem, a master at subverting expectations of form and genre. He has not written a conventional postapocalyptic cautionary tale. If anything, he seems more interested in unpacking assumptions built into such tales, and why we seem to have an endless appetite for stories that, presumably, should make us feel terrible.
There was the day: the forsythia
at your fence a conflagration
of yellow, the sun, a more obvious
conflagration of yellow, and spring
When our family was young
and the children took off over the stones like little dogs
as we followed in our different conversation
and the game was, to come back with the Best